


no returning to the spoils

by incognitajones



Series: Reconstruction Site [1]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen, Post-Canon, yet another redemption story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-05-04
Updated: 2016-05-04
Packaged: 2018-06-05 18:54:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,601
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6717019
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/incognitajones/pseuds/incognitajones
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kylo Ren might be helpless for the moment, but they had to have a plan for dealing with him before he woke. Wounded predators were only more dangerous and unpredictable.</p>
            </blockquote>





	no returning to the spoils

**Author's Note:**

> Note that I haven't read _Bloodline_ , so there may well be story elements which contradict that canon.

_Forgiveness is contact with the belief_  
_that your only life must now be lived._  
\- Molly Peacock

 

The med-techs refused to let Rey walk, so she commandeered a mobility chair and piloted it into the barren white observation room where Leia stood watching her son in the bacta tank. The General’s eyes were hollow, the shadows under them stained purple-black; for the first time, Rey could trace a resemblance between her and Kylo. The small space was crowded with other bodies in uniform, Resistance commanders and advisors, but Rey ignored them. 

“Is it done?”

Leia didn’t turn away from the window, her palm pressed to the glass. 

“I called in an airstrike an hour ago. What remained of that temple is rubble. Luke will go down once he’s able and ensure that nothing with any… resonance is left.”

“Good.” The wire-taut tension strung through Rey’s spine slackened by a notch. 

No more dark relics. Rey didn’t want some Dark side-worshipping dupe to build a shrine for Snoke’s bones or Kylo Ren’s broken mask—or Kylo himself to get it back.

She glanced at the emaciated body in the tank for the first time. His face was hidden by floating hair like a cloud of ink, and the ragged, vicious wound in his arm had barely sealed over.

“What are you going to do with him?”

The background hum of conversation faded away as Leia finally turned to stare at Rey, who tried to keep her expression steady under the General’s regard. Surely she hadn’t been the first to ask the blindingly obvious question… but apparently, she had. Well, by now she was used to barging in where others were wiser than to tread.

Leia approached Rey’s chair and clamped one hand on her shoulder with a grip like steel pincers. She searched Rey’s face with a painfully hopeful gaze.

“Luke says that he helped you, at the end—that he killed Snoke.”

Rey couldn’t meet Leia’s stare any longer. She looked down at her own bruised, cut feet. “He did. But I don’t know why.” She remembered the moment when the eye exposed by his broken mask had blinked, slowly, and the dizzy, churning mix of horror and rage that had risen in her because Kylo Ren wasn't dead.

The other voices in the room rose as overlapping arguments resumed. 

“Trial - imprisonment - a cell five klicks underground,” Rey heard. “He should wake up outside an airlock,” someone muttered—someone with a Hosnian accent.

Leia’s eyes blazed with a fury that made her look even more like her son. She whirled to face the others, intimidating them into silence again. “We wouldn’t do that to any other prisoner. We won’t do it to him, nor will we condemn him until we have a fuller understanding of whether he’s turned away from the dark.”

That was all well and noble, but Rey couldn’t help pointing out the unspoken complication. 

“It’s not possible to imprison such a powerful Force-user for long,” she argued. “He’d escape eventually. Execution might be the only answer.”

Leia passed a hand over her face, only for an instant, but prickling cold swept over Rey as the implications of what she’d just suggested sunk in. And yet, she couldn’t regret saying it. Kylo Ren might be helpless for the moment, but they had to have a plan for dealing with him before he woke. Wounded predators were only more dangerous and unpredictable.

Until now, Luke had remained silent at the back of the room. He limped forward to stand beside his sister and put his arm around her. For an eyeblink, Leia leaned into him with a stiff sigh that told Rey just how exhausted the General must be.

Luke looked at her and she could see an apology in his eyes for what he was about to ask. “There may be another way, if Rey is willing to help.”

 

He opened his eyes—even that simple act shot flares of pain through his synapses—and stared at the bunk a foot above his head.

This wasn’t possible. He knew the feeling of the cheap foam mattress deep in his bones, just as well as his eyes knew the pattern of scratches in the plasteel above. But the last clear memory he had was of Snoke’s head rolling down the steps in front of him as he dropped to his knees, agony piercing his right arm.

He must be dead. If there were any sort of afterlife, that would explain why he was on the _Millennium Falcon_ : his own personal version of hell.

A scornful snort interrupted him, and he jolted up, banging his head on the bunk above—like he’d done every other time he’d slept aboard this scrap heap.

“Always so melodramatic,” Rey said. “You’re not in hell.” 

He fell back onto the bunk and closed his eyes again, obscurely relieved by the sound of her voice. Of course, if it were hell, no doubt she’d be there to torture him. “Are you quite sure?”

“Quite,” she echoed in her clipped Reaches accent. “It would have been easier for everyone if you’d conveniently died, but you were uncooperative, as always.”

“Sorry to ruin your plans.” 

He sat up, slowly this time as he re-established control over his exhausted body. He hunched over the edge of the mattress with his elbows on his knees, resting his head in his hands until the supernovas in front of his eyes stopped exploding. His black robes were gone; he was wearing a set of coarse cotton medical-issue tunic and pants. He looked at his right forearm and didn’t see shattered bone. It was branded with a livid new scar, pricklingly tender in a way that indicated recent surgery and accelerated bone growth.

He looked up at Rey. She was sitting on the opposite bunk, her posture mimicking his—perhaps deliberately. She carried no weapons that he could see or sense and seemed relaxed and confident. But as an expert in failed self-control, it was easy for him to identify all the signals that she wasn’t. She’d restrained her presence in the Force tightly, pulled it in close like an animal curled up to give a predator as little hold as possible. He imitated her and compressed all of his pain and fear into a solid mass within his chest that armored him enough to ask the next logical question.

“Are you going to kill me?”

She snorted again, with a contemptuous twist to her mouth.

“You wouldn’t have woken up at all, in that case.” Her eyes flickered to his wounded arm. “Some advocated for that solution, but they were overruled.”

He closed his eyes and sighed. “By the General.” The woman still wouldn’t let him escape the reach of her love.

“No,” Rey said. A hot spike of some stark emotion—even he didn’t know whether it was rage or shame—escaped his control. “It was your uncle who convinced the Resistance leadership to try this instead.” She sounded almost gleeful at sensing his reaction. 

It was taking all of his strength to maintain a semblance of calm. He didn’t have breath to spare for the obvious follow-up question, even if he’d wanted to give her the satisfaction.

Rey paused for an expectant moment, but when he said nothing she couldn’t hold back the unsought explanation.

“We’re in orbit around a small, uninhabited moon somewhere on the Outer Rim. Every weapon has been taken off the ship; everything dangerous, except the two of us.” A small, perverse smile drew up one corner of her mouth. “There are only two possible ends for you from this point on, Ben Solo—” oh, how she enjoyed using his former name “—freedom, or death. And I’m the person who’s going to choose which one.”

Confused fury bubbled up in him, and his rage threatened to ignite. This insignificant scavenger, who’d stepped into his place as Skywalker’s apprentice, dared to stand in judgment over him? If she was so willing to kill him, why wouldn’t she just do it now? He didn’t understand what this was meant to prove. Forcing his voice to remain even, he asked, “Why you?”

His anger had infected Rey, or else her control was slipping; her voice roughened into a growl when she answered. “Because my judgement won’t be clouded by an emotional attachment.” 

He almost laughed. “You hate me. That’s an emotional attachment.”

“Yes, but it won’t give me false hope that you’ve changed. You won’t be able to manipulate me as easily as you could Luke or your mother.”

He did laugh then, a bitter snapped-off sound that caught in his throat, at the thought of Skywalker or the General letting any emotion sway their decisions. Rey paused, but when he didn’t make another noise she continued. 

“You can’t escape the ship, or take control of it. You can’t kill me—well, you can, but if you do you won’t get far. If you want to get off the _Falcon_ , you have to convince me that you’ve truly turned away from the dark.”

Rey thought she was threatening him; she didn’t know what a temptation her words offered. It would be so easy to kill her. He wouldn’t even need the Force to do it. And if she were telling the truth, it might even get him what he wanted. 

He started to laugh again, and couldn’t stop. 

He covered his face with his hands and tried to push the horrifying sound back down his throat, but it refused to be smothered. Rey stayed seated, watching him, for a while. Eventually, when she realized it was hopeless, she got up and left him alone.

After some time—he didn’t know how long—the noises coming from him slowed, and finally ceased. He swiped at his wet face and thought about lying down. Even with his eyes closed, though, he’d see the wobbly letters scratching out BEN WAS HERE above his head.

He stumbled across to the other bunk instead and managed to fold into a shape that let him just barely fit inside. His consciousness narrowed to the task of controlling his breathing until he could fall asleep.

Maybe this time he’d be lucky enough not to wake up.

 

Rey struggled to think of the man on the _Falcon_ only as Ben Solo. If she didn’t use the name Kylo Ren even in her thoughts, it helped to contain her enormous, inchoate rage, at least a little.

She’d been prepared for destructive rages, physical attacks, stealthy psychic infiltration with the Force—anything but what actually happened. After their first conversation when he woke, Ben didn’t speak for days. He lay crammed into one of the bunks, his head turned to the wall, with occasional trips to the galley or fresher. Or he paced through the ship, going in unending circles like a tethered luggabeast. The first time she’d encountered him in one of the narrow passages she’d tensed, expecting him to lunge at her, but he hadn’t even looked at her as he brushed past. His eyes seemed to be focused on something that wasn’t there.

On the third morning, as she was unenthusiastically preparing breakfast, he walked into the galley and sat down on the bench that curved around the table. “How long are there rations for?”

Rey’s hand jerked at the sound of his rusty voice and she nearly scalded herself with boiling water. She considered not answering, but couldn’t see that the knowledge would give him any critical advantage.

“Two weeks.”

“Meaning you have eleven days left to work up the nerve to kill me.” He sounded as perfectly unconcerned as though he were discussing hyperlane trajectory calculations.

“I told you, that’s not why I’m here.”

Rey looked over to where Ben sat hunched over, knees bumping against the bottom of the table. Physically, he seemed weakened from long privation but recovering. His face was less gaunt and the new scar on his arm had already faded to a pale clear red like sunrise. She still had almost no sense of what he thought, or felt, or intended. The transient emotions that shifted over his face were clear enough, but underneath his surface irritation at her all she could sense was acidic depths of loathing and hatred—for himself, or others, she couldn’t tell.

He snorted. “Isn’t Skywalker worried I’ll get away somehow? What if I corrupt you, and the two of us go off to crush the entire galaxy under our boots?”

“Your fantasies are irrelevant.” Rey slammed a bowl on the table in front of him, slopping oatmeal over the side. “And what makes you think either of us would survive, in that case? I’ve told you, there are fail-safes.”

He looked revolted by the food, but started eating mechanically and quickly as though she’d take it away from him if he didn’t. “Kill his last pupil and only remaining hope to found a new Jedi Order? I don’t think so.”

“Luke’s already accepted sacrificing his sister’s son, if necessary. I doubt including a raw apprentice would give him pause.” She managed to sound equally unperturbed by the possibility, thanks in part to the fact she was talking with her mouth full.

“If you believe he’d do that, you really don’t know him.” 

“Well, you don’t know me. I’d do it, if I have to—I don’t give a sarlacc’s pit about the Jedi Order,” Rey said. “And I’m not Luke’s last pupil anyway. There’s another.”

Ben’s spoon fell rattling into his empty bowl. “Who?”

Rey grinned around her last mouthful of oatmeal, relishing his look of disgust at her table manners even more than the food. “Finn.” 

“The traitor?” 

“Yes.” Rey got up to scrape her bowl and dump it in the cycler, leaving Ben stunned into silence. 

She hadn't told him the full truth, but she didn't feel any compunction about leaving out the fact that while Finn might be Force-sensitive, he hadn't actually had any training yet. It might not be wise to enjoy taunting an immensely powerful Force user of unknown loyalties, but seeing Ben so horrified was entirely too pleasurable. And at least it shut him up again.

 

Every time he woke in that cramped bunk, he wondered whether he was really alive or just a trapped ghost reliving its own past. His drab medical robes resembled what he’d worn as Skywalker’s pupil, a lifetime ago. Wandering the corridors of the _Falcon_ —somewhere he’d believed he’d never set foot again—sometimes he saw his father out of the corner of his eye. He didn’t know whether these visions were hallucinations or memories made tangible by the Force. Luckily, he told himself, Han had been so Force-blind he’d never be capable of returning to haunt his murderer.

Most disorienting of all, with Snoke dead his carefully hoarded bank of rage had somehow vanished. The bottomless well of fury he relied on—his best enemy and most reliable ally—had drained away, leaving nothing but exhaustion. He was angry at Rey, of course, but that common, everyday anger was useless as fuel; it was brief stuttering blaster fire instead of deep pools of magma.

Empty of his wrath he was left without an anchor, nothing to hold him down against the currents of guilt.

While he huddled in his bunk, not sleeping, he tried to decide which of his crimes they would judge him most harshly for. Patricide could be construed as a crime of passion, though what he’d done to Han had been the opposite; watching while whole villages, cities, planets were consumed was too abstract, a bystander’s sin. 

In the end, it was obvious that his defining atrocity would be the Jedi temple. It combined the taint of betrayal—he’d known every one of them personally, students and teachers—with the horror almost every sentient being felt at the untimely death of the young.

When he couldn’t stand the decaying orbit of his own thoughts anymore, he spoke to her.

“You shouldn’t have rescued me,” he told Rey. She knew that, of course, but he wanted to see whether he could force her to admit it.

She was sprawled on a bunk across the room, trying to watch a scratchy old holo-novel she’d found somewhere on board. She never slept in the crew quarters, only in the pilot’s chair—when she slept. She didn’t look at him as she answered. “You were wounded. Leaving you to die in pain would have been unconscionably cruel.”

“And killing me now wouldn’t be?” He shook his head, hair falling into his eyes. “Sometimes I really don’t understand the ways of the so-called light side.”

Rey put down the holo and leaned back against her pillow. “If I had my way, you’d spend the rest of your life in a cell. You’d never see natural light or breathe unfiltered air again. That would be cruel. But I can think of a hundred ways to escape from prison, given enough time, and I haven’t nearly as much skill in using the Force.”

He couldn’t stop a smirk from pulling at the corner of his mouth; at least she had that much prudence.

“Then kill me and be done with it,” he sighed, draping an arm over his eyes. “Or if you’re too much of a coward for that, let me die. Leave the ship and wait until the atmosphere runs out. Your hands will be clean and I’ll still get what I deserve.”

Rey picked up her holo-novel again, maddeningly dispassionate. “You don’t get to decide that.”

“And you do? Who are you to say?” he sneered, still straining to provoke her.

“I’m not here to decide whether you deserve to live. I can’t be the judge of that. What I have to figure out is whether you’re too dangerous to live.”

He laced his fingers together over his chest and stared at the smooth ceiling of the bunk. There it was: his way out. Rey’s intelligence was adequate; it shouldn’t take her long to realize he was too feral to be trusted.

 

After that conversation, Ben stopped talking again.

Even when he was doing nothing, he was hard to ignore, like an icy planet that seemed barren and serene at first pass until you flew close enough to sense that under the thick crust seethed an active volcanic core. Or maybe a black hole was the better image: there was a sucking wound of entropy in him, despair so dense it pulled her down even in sleep. 

Whenever she moved around the ship, Rey swiveled to look over her shoulder at every third step, twitchy and hair-triggered by the tingling along her nerves. She was sharing the Falcon with a vicious predator caught in a leg-trap. Would it be more merciful to free the creature, or put it out of its misery? She didn’t know how long it would take for Ben to become desperate enough to chew his own foot off, metaphorically speaking, but the aftermath was guaranteed to be disastrous and bloody.

And yet she didn't know whether he was still an enemy; she had no idea what he wanted. She wished he’d do something, anything, that would allow her to vent her anger. 

In an attempt to maintain some precarious control, Rey spent much of her time sitting on the floor of the cockpit practicing what Luke had called compassionate meditation. It began with looking impartially at oneself—weakness and strength, darkness and light—and accepting each piece as part of the whole. Next, you widened the field of your lens to others you knew and cared for, seeing them also in their entirety, both good and bad. The last step was to extend this form of vision to an antagonist.

Rey focused on Ben.

After days of meditation, she’d managed to identify three things she knew of him that were admirable. One was that he had refrained from killing her in their first confrontation, when it would have been easy for him to do so. The second and third were that Luke and Leia loved him.

Frustrated, she broke from her crosslegged pose and fell back on to the deck, staring up through the viewscreen at the faint blue striations of the moon they were orbiting. At this rate, it would take years for her to achieve the level of empathy she needed to have any hope of understanding Ben and his motivations. Rey had five days.

With two days left, she got desperate.

 

He got up to use the fresher and cocked his head, feeling a twitch of curiosity; the atmosphere of the ship was different, though he couldn’t define exactly how. Maybe Rey had finally come to her senses and made the decision to dispose of him.

He shuffled into the galley and found her sitting at the table, staring into a glass of cortyg brandy. “I thought you said there was nothing dangerous left on the ship.”

“Stars, a joke?” She put a hand over her mouth when she snickered, as though she didn’t want to admit he’d amused her. “I thought your sense of humour had been surgically removed.”

He shrugged. “Even the First Order knows what sarcasm is.” He sat down across from her and turned the bottle around—the Wookiee’s homebrew, of course.

She picked up the glass and drained it in one swallow, licking her lips. “That burns.”

“Yes, it does. Why are you drinking it?”

Rey squared her shoulders the same way he’d seen her brace herself in opening position with her saber. “I have to relax and open to the Force somehow to get any answers out of you. That’s obviously going to require some kind of mind-altering substance, and alcohol was all I could find.”

She wasn’t wrong; they had to end this stalemate, and it might as well be here and now. He lifted the bottle to his mouth and poured a long swallow down his throat. It stung, but a refined palate had never been one of Han’s vices. He coughed and wiped his mouth with the side of his hand before leaning forward to refill her glass.

She held it up to the light dubiously. “I haven’t tried a lot of liquor. Is this as awful as I think?” 

“Absolutely.”

Rey tilted her head and stared at him with one magnified eye through the pink liquid before she downed it. Her cheeks were already flushed a blotchy red and her presence was unfolding within the Force, blooming bright and just a touch off-centre. He picked up the bottle and filled her glass.

“Drink first. You need to catch up,” she ordered.

“I haven’t eaten in six hours.”

“And you have at least twenty kilos on me. Drink.”

At this pace, the conversation was going to unravel far too quickly for him to control. But he drank.

Rey’s mental edges, normally sharp and crystalline, were softening under the effect of the alcohol, blurring like melting ice. He knew what she was going to ask a moment before she opened her mouth from the way the lens of her mind focused on a single point.

“Why did you change sides in the end? You nearly killed me defending Snoke, and then you turned on him.”

“I wasn’t fighting to defend him. I was fighting you because you attacked me.” He took another drink and wiped his mouth again, buying time. “I expected to die. You almost took my arm off, you know.”

“I know.” A sly, proud smile flickered at the corners of her mouth. She hid it by sipping from her glass.

“I thought Luke was dead. I was dying, and then Snoke would take you, twist you and destroy you.” And his mother…

But he would never admit to that, no matter how much he drank. He lifted the bottle to his mouth again while she watched his face with voracious eyes. “I didn’t want Snoke to be the only one left standing. I didn’t want him to have more centuries to corrupt the galaxy.”

“Centuries?”

He put the bottle down on the table and idly rotated it with one hand, tilting it from side to side, keeping it upright with small nudges of the Force. “He claimed to have watched and manipulated events from behind the scenes for ages. And I had no reason not to believe him. He knew things.”

“Did you kill him so you could take his place, like the Sith Lords and their apprentices?”

“That was never my ambition.”

“Probably true,” Rey mused, tipping her head to one side. “I never sensed that from you.” The bottle was half-empty already, but she held out her glass and he managed to fill it without slopping brandy over the table.

He set the bottle down slowly as he felt Rey’s energies gather into a demanding, insistent pulse. She was building to the kill stroke.

“Then why?” Her voice was honed to a cutting edge meant to draw blood. “If it wasn’t for power, what was the grand design? What was worth killing your friends, your father? All the thousands of others?”

Nothing. 

Now that Snoke’s presence was gone, leaving a raw abscess in his riddled soul, the rationales he’d hugged to himself through the years seemed like no more than the petulant defiance of a spoiled child: _I’ll show you!_ Distilled bitterness burned like poison in his every cell. 

Rey rocked back in her seat as the uncontrolled emotion flooded into her. 

“What did Snoke offer you?” she whispered.

“I was afraid, and alone. Like you.” He threw back one of the few images he retained from his plunder of her memories: Rey defending herself on Jakku with a staff. “He spent years seducing me, promising enough power to keep away the things I feared, of course. And the reassurance that it was meant to be. That the tortures I went through—that I inflicted—would make me stronger, burn away my weaknesses.”

Rey shook her head, anger blistering the air around her. “You were never alone! You had loving parents, family, friends. I would have given anything for that.”

“Exactly,” he snarled, leaning forward over the table to shove the words into her face. “If he’d come to you and told you we could trade places, that you could have what I had, what would you have done to make that happen? If he’d promised you a home?”

“Not murder!” Rey was standing now, charged air lifting strands of her hair like a solar corona. Her eyes were golden and her fists were curled tight at her sides, resisting the desire to strike him. 

He rose to his feet to face her, feeling the lightning build through his own veins. Both of them were leaking power carelessly now. The table trembled as it tried to lift from the floor and everything in the galley not bolted down rattled and shook. 

“You’re so certain only because you’ve never been truly tempted. What if he’d offered you revenge on the people who abandoned you?” he demanded. He had to make her see how only the knife’s edge separated them. “How satisfying would it have been to make them pay?” 

She was incandescent now, too bright to look at, pressing him back with the thick atmosphere of her rising fury. Phantom fingers curled lightly around his throat at last. Emptiness roared through him and he felt the void opening beneath his feet. So close now.

“You’ll never be able to trust me. I could kill you whenever I chose. All the lives I took deserve justice.” He took two steps around the table, hemming her in and looming over her in a deliberate threat. “I’m telling the truth and you know it.”

Rey slammed him back against the bulkhead with a contemptuous wave of her hand. His head cracked against the metal and his vision smeared, turning her into a shining column of light. For a long, perfect moment he believed she would do it. He closed his eyes, suspended in agonizing hope. 

But she hesitated, her hand raised, and he felt her shock when she glimpsed what he’d hidden behind the smokescreen of absolute truth. Her rage evaporated, turning the air suddenly frigid, and she dropped him to the floor. “You _want_ me to kill you.” 

“Yes!” he screamed. He had no pride left, no feeling other than the need to be obliterated. To be nothing. “Why won’t you just _do_ it!” 

“Because.” Rey collapsed on the bench, small and human again. She rested her head in her hands. “I won’t kill you in cold blood. I can’t. Even if it would be the wisest thing to do.” 

He pushed himself up to his knees. “Do you want me to beg? Is that it?”

“No more melodrama, please,” Rey said wearily. “I can’t take it right now.” She picked up the glass of brandy and gulped it, her throat working.

“I can’t go back.” He was scraped hollow, too drained even to feel humiliated. “If I do, it was all for nothing. Everything I did becomes even worse, because it was pointless.”

“So you should stay a monster? Give up and die so that you don’t have to face any consequences?” Rey slammed her glass down so hard that it cracked. “You’re a lot of awful things, Ben, but I honestly never thought you were a coward until now.”

“Don't call me by that name.” He swept the bottle off the table without touching it, feeling a childish satisfaction as it smashed at her feet. “This isn’t some Old Republic fairytale, and you’re not the pure-hearted Jedi knight who’s going to redeem me. Nothing I can do will ever balance the scales.”

“There are no scales, and no-one is pure-hearted.” Her anger was spiky, with cutting edges like the shards of glass on the floor. “Yes, you’ve done terrible things. But do you think my hands are perfectly clean? Every living being does wrong—you have, I have, and both of us will again. We can’t let that make us turn away from the chance to try again.” 

“Do expound more of your simplistic moral code,” he said. “It’s very amusing.”

She threw her head back in frustration. “It’s impossible to get anything through your thick skull. I don't know why Luke sent me to do this.”

“Because you hate me,” he reminded her. He stood, using the bulkhead for support as a rush of dizziness warned him that he was still drunk.

“That’s what he said. But I think he believes I’m strong enough to help you. He shouldn’t put so much faith in me.”

He couldn’t believe that Rey didn’t see her own worth. “Don’t be an idiot. You’re strong enough—and not just in the Force—to do almost anything. But you still can’t save me.” 

The thought _No-one can_ wasn’t supposed to have escaped the confines of his own head, but from the way Rey flinched he knew she’d overheard.

“I need sleep,” she muttered, scrubbing a hand across her face. “So do you.” She leaned heavily on the table before she straightened to her feet. “More shouting won’t get us anywhere right now. We’ll discuss your death wish in the morning. Don’t do anything rash in the meantime.”

“Define rash,” he countered automatically. But he was just as drained, too exhausted to contemplate anything but sleep himself.

“And clean up that mess.” She stepped over the broken bottle and stumbled down the passage to the crew quarters.

 

Rey’s mouth was sticky and her eyes burned as though she’d gone out into a sandstorm without goggles. She threw an arm over her head to shield them from the light. “I am never drinking that stuff again.” The words rasped in her throat like gravel, and she rolled over on her side to cough.

Ben’s long height loomed into her blurry vision. “Proof you’re more intelligent than Han Solo ever was.”

Her spine cracked ferociously as she struggled to sit up and realized part of the reason for her sore muscles was the lack of any bedding underneath her. “Why am I on the floor?” She drew in careful, controlled breaths to subdue the nausea rising from her belly.

Ben shrugged. “You said something about making sure you wouldn’t fall off the bunk. I wasn’t going to argue.” 

He tossed her a bulb of water. Rey fumbled to catch it, popped the top off and sucked it dry in one continuous swallow. She gathered herself and made a heroic attempt to stand, but her muscles were as firm as gelatin. Ben’s hand appeared in front of her. Without allowing herself to think she grabbed it and let him haul her to her feet. As soon as she was upright, he let go and she nearly overbalanced backwards. 

She steadied herself with a grunt and looked up to find him watching her like a piece of unexploded ordnance. “You need to eat something,” he said, curt, and handed her a ration bar. 

Once Rey had crammed it into her mouth she felt as human as she thought possible, at least until she could take a shower. “Let’s get this over with,” she muttered, spraying crumbs. “Do you want to talk in the galley?”

“It smells like a distillery in there.” He sighed and settled to the floor, folding to sit cross-legged. “Here is as good as anywhere.”

She perched on the edge of the bunk, wrapping her arms around her knees, and contemplated Ben at length, unmasked and in full light, for the first time in days—or possibly years. The scar across his face had faded since her saber cleaved it in their first duel, but the pale furrow woke the same obscure tangle of pride and shame every time she saw it. She still couldn’t read him; he was as guarded as if their savage, uncontrolled verbal sparring last night had never happened. As if he’d never tried to goad her into murdering him.

“Are you going to make me ask?” he said at last, and Rey realized she had left an awkwardly long silence. Heat raced up her neck and she abandoned any hope of sounding like a wise and tranquil Jedi. 

“I told you already,” she muttered gracelessly. “I don’t care what you want, I’m not going to kill you.”

Ben raised a dubious eyebrow, and her still-queasy guts clenched at how much it made him look like his father. She didn’t know how the General would be able to bear seeing her son again. Wasn’t that one more reason, piled on top of hundreds of others, to grant him the death he wanted and be done with it?

No. One of them had to have some common sense, and it looked as though she were the unfortunate nominee. 

“Despite your best efforts to convince me, I don’t believe you’re interested in more bloodshed. If you were you’d have killed me by now. And I’m a practical person—it goes with being a scavenger.” She gave him a thin smile as she repeated his old insult. “So I don’t give too much weight to your feelings. If you can be of service in mending even a small part of what you destroyed, then I want you to live a long life. Whether you spend every day of it wishing you were dead is immaterial.”

His amber eyes were ringed with darker pigment, like a caged hawk she’d once seen on Coruscant. “And you claim to belong to the light?”

Rey’s smile vanished. “I might give my pettier emotions free rein once in a while, but I’ve never ordered an entire village killed. Or betrayed my colleagues to death. Or murdered my father.” 

She let out a long, painfully steady breath, ignoring the headache that was straining to expand the insides of her skull. “I’m trying to forgive you. And I hope that I can, some day. But I will never forget.”

Ben looked down at the floor and clasped his hands together with care, almost managing to conceal their shaking. “No-one will.”

“Probably not,” she agreed. “But that doesn’t change anything.” 

“I think your scruples will be moot, in any case.” He glanced back up at her. “The New Republic isn’t likely to concur with your assessment.”

Rey hadn’t thought of that; but she felt certain the General had, and had plans to cover that contingency as well. 

“Would you surrender to them?” she asked, honestly curious. Ben might want to die on his own terms, but willingly submitting to imprisonment followed by execution seemed like the last thing such an arrogant man would ever do.

He considered it, emotions flickering across his face too quickly to identify.

“I’d prefer death in combat, or if not, at least at your hands… but if they sentenced me to execution, I would go. I’m sure Skywalker would be happy to ensure my co-operation,” he added with the undercurrent of spite that was always present when he spoke of his uncle.

“I take it back. You’re not a coward, you’re an idiot.” Rey rolled her eyes. “We’ll find out soon enough whether you get your wish.” She unfolded from her cramped position and drew her spine straight, striving to assume a mantle of authority she felt desperately unworthy of. “But if you live, I want your word that you’ll do whatever is in your power to make amends.” 

He didn’t move and the expression on his face didn’t change, but the depth of wearied anguish in his eyes shocked her. He seemed to have aged a hundred years in an instant. Or maybe, like the trapped animal, he’d simply lost the strength to fight her. 

“I will.” She had to lean forward to hear his answer, barely audible over the hum of the ship’s systems. “But I have no idea what I can do.” 

He bowed his head. “Tell me where to start. Please.” 

Rey reached out and laid her right hand on his trembling shoulder. He cringed and she caught a flashing impression of how many years it had been since anyone had touched him without intending harm. His whole body shook under the light pressure of her hand. She firmed her grip, trying to convince both of them she knew what she was doing.

“Start by training Finn.”

“Him?” Ben’s head snapped up; clearly his attempt at humility only stretched so far. “I thought he was your friend. Why would you trust me with him?”

“You begged me to set you a task. Are you going to listen?” Rey glared at him until he dropped his eyes to the floor again. “Finn’s the only person I know other than your family who might understand you, a little. He faced the same choice. And he needs to be taught.”

The more Rey thought about it, the more confident she felt. Maybe the Force had guided her first impulse. “And you can do it on Takodana, where Maz Kanata can keep watch over both of you. Do you agree?”

She put her fingertips under his chin and pressed it up, forcing him to look at her again. She wanted to lay him bare, leave him nowhere to hide.

“Yes.” He met her eyes without evasion for once. She could feel him fumbling to open a crack in the thorny wall of his defenses, trying to show her the firmness of his resolution. “If they let me live, I’ll do as you ask.”

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the Avett Brothers song "February 7."
> 
> This was the very first story I started writing in this fandom, moments after leaving the movie theatre. It took a long time to wrestle into this shape; in the meantime, of course, everyone & their sister had written their take on a redemption arc. Hopefully I found something new or different to express in this one anyways.
> 
> Huge thanks to englishable for beta-reading this and making it better in every way that counts.
> 
> Also, I've given in to another form of procrastination & joined Tumblr at [incognitajones](http://incognitajones.tumblr.com).


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